The popularity of the Internet, and in particular, the portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, continues to grow. The World Wide Web is basically a collection of computers that are operatively linked together through a plurality of communication networks. Typically, users access the World Wide Web through a personal computer or like device, which is connected to the Internet via a modem of some type. For example, many users of the World Wide Web connect to the Internet using a dial-up telephone networked modem configured to establish data communications through an Internet Services Provider (ISP). Other users connect to the Internet with a faster modem, e.g., a cable modem, digital subscriber line (DSL) modem, etc.
Regardless of how a user ultimately connects to the Internet/World Wide Web, once connected the user typically accesses information available therein by using a web browser or like application. A web browser, such as, for example, Internet Explorer (IE) available from the Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., is configured to access web pages that are provided through the Internet by other computers. For example, a web server computer may be connected to the Internet and configured with one or more web sites, each having one or more web pages that the user may selectively download and view and possibly interact with. To identify which web site/page the user will typically select a hyper link to the desired web site/page or may choose to manually enter a unique name for the web site/page. The most common name used for identifying a web site/page is known as the uniform resource locator (URL).
One example of a URL is “http://www.microsoft.com”. By entering this URL, the user will be connected to an appropriate web server which hosts the Microsoft Corp. web site, and the requested web page will be downloaded, in this case using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), to the web browser. Within the Internet itself, the selected URL will be associated with a specific Internet Protocol (IP) address. This IP address takes the form of a unique numerical identifier, which has been assigned to the targeted web server. Thus, a user may also directly enter an IP address in the web browser. However, the majority of users tend to favor the use of the more easily remembered and entered URL.
When a typical web server receives a request, e.g., an HTTP request, from a web browser, it needs to handle the request. Hence, a web server process may be configured to handle the request itself, or may need to pass the request on to another process, e.g., a worker process, that is configured to handle the request. Conventional web server processes tend to listen to a particular port (e.g., “port 80”) provided by a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) kernel-mode provided service. When a request is received, the web server process either handles the request or calls for a worker process to handle the request. To determine which worker process should handle the request, most conventional web server processes either map the request to a physical file or to a dynamic application of some sort, such as a DLL or CGI process. Mapping is typically based on the extension provided at the end of the URL. For example, an “html” extension signifies that the desired web page is in a HyperText Markup Language format. This extension could then be found, for example, in a look-up table, and associated with a specific worker process, if needed. Conversely, the html extension may identify that the web server process can handle the request itself. There exists a plurality of extensions that may be used to identify the applicable worker process.
Once a specific worker process has been identified, the worker process is started (as needed) and the request is forwarded to the worker process. Such decisions and subsequent routing of the request are conducted by user-mode processes. Note that the web server process is a user-mode process too.
Unfortunately, there is usually a delay associated with such user-mode “process hops”. For web servers, which often receive thousands of requests each minute, the delays associated with process hops can diminish the efficiency of the web server. In certain configurations, the web server process may be required to share a common communication port with one or more worker processes. This too may further reduce the efficiency of the web server. Moreover, there can be a reduction in the robustness of the web server in certain situations, e.g., when a worker process fails to receive/complete the request, etc.
As such, there is need for improved methods and arrangements in determining which user-mode processes should handle a given request, initiating the appropriate user-mode process, passing the request to the user-mode process, and managing the various requests and user-mode processes.